Chapter 3. Changing and Adjusting Colors

Almost any photograph can benefit from some simple color or lighting corrections. For example, you might find that a vivid sunset you photographed ends up looking rather dull and ordinary, or that a portrait taken outdoors is too dark to make out any details. Luckily, with Photoshop Elements, you're never stuck with a roll of inferior images. Photoshop Elements provides a powerful set of color correction tools, with both manual and automatic adjustments, so that you can fine-tune your images as much as you want.

In this chapter, I'll review Photoshop Elements' color-correction tools and discuss which tools you may want to use, and when you'll most likely want to use them. I'll also show you how to make sure colors display and print accurately (also known as color management) and how to correct colors and tonal values in your images. Along the way, I'll shed some light on why what may at first appear to be the most obvious color-enhancement options are not always the best choices for improving the color in an image.